I have a lifetime membership of Plex and a years license of Audirvana Studio purely as backups to my Roon lifetime membership since 2018. Let me tell you both Plex and Audirvana come nowhere close to the functionality of Roon. The way both handle multi disc sets is atrocious, and trying for example to merge two discs in Plex is nigh on impossible! in my experience. the only way to merge multi disc sets in Audirvana is to save as a playlist which is a complete pain. Yes Roon has its faults regarding the issue of multi disc sets for example but boy it is light years ahead of Plex and Audirvana, so be careful what you wish for!.
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Exactly. So I went back to JRiver and everything works fine again.
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I have just bought a years sub for AS just for the hell of it. I had a 1 yr just as it was launched and gave up as it simply couldn’t talk to my CXN V1
i decided to give it a proper run through jus for fun
Everyone claims SQ improvement over Roon . Not heard it yet
Always like a good challenge trying new stuff but TBH its still a pale shadow of Roon . Lets see what 6 months gives
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Except the people who claim that Roon sounds bad and AS (or whatever other bit-perfect player) sounds better. It’s delusions on all sides.
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They hear what they want to hear.
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Jriver also can stream to Raspbi’ s. I have three with Hifiberry connected and it works fine. But you cannot group them. However, I am thinking about running one JRiver instance on a small PC as a sort “Zone-Server” just for a tryout.
I ran Roon for about two hours last night through my PC’s sound card with no issues. As to the 218 being “Roon Ready” or otherwise I don’t know. All I can say is it was sold to me on the basis that it would work with Roon and it duly has for the last seven years. There does, surprisingly to me at least, seem to be an issue with the 218 based on my test last night so I’m going to contact Mr Tech Guy in Stilton to ask about a firmware update.
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Hmm I find it works fine for boxsets that I have as long as your metadata is good. I also like the collection feature which means you can split albums into individuals and group them as a boxset as a collection.
Hello, as posted by many fellow Roon users I too believe that while your installation of Roon on your NAS is an option and probably ran successfully for years, as software upgrades can bring many new features some of those small changes can be impact the performance of where and how you were using it before. I have this exact QNAP and did for testing try Roon on it, I don’t know if you are running Plex which I was or and other QNAP software but as these will be updated from time to time and you run the risk of those impacting your Roon. I decided to buy a Tiny Lenovo i5 6th Gen CPU,8 Gab RAM 256GB SSD desktop $150, and installed Rock on it, never looked back the performance ability to manage, attached my local and network mapped media such a better option. I find NAS creates a layer away from the applications and that having them on a dedicated computer make like SSH and other daily features with the application much easier to manage. And since I use my Roon daily to stream to 5-6 endpoints (4 RoPieee HD) I need this to work and be reliable and not be co-located with other services.
I also have Roon stopping randomly but didn’t bother to post about it. Thank you for doing so.
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What a silly response. Users expect an update to work. If the issuer of the update thinks it may not, there should be a warning with the update saying something like “update at your own discression as it may mess up your system”
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Wrong. It is not a “silly response.” It is a point of fact. Users can choose for whatever reason not to download and install an update. Alan believed that not to be possible. But he was mistaken.
AJ
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This can never be ruled out to 100% so it’s always implicit, and in any case you always update at your own discretion
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I have Audirvana as a stand alone music player, this was it’s last incarnation before it became a subscription. It cannot cope with large libraries (115,000 tracks on SSD) and goes into library scanning mode on start up, uses all the RAM I have and freezes. For train trips on a laptop or playing smaller numbers of files it is fine.
There really is no good alternative to Roon that has the following:
- Rich metadata with advanced search features
- Integrated searching/playlists across local library and Tidal/Qobuz
- Ability to group multiple Sonos zones with seamless downsampling of hi-res content as necessary.
- While being able to use the same metadata, tags and playlists with my main system with bit-perfect full hi-res to a audiophile DAC
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I can fully subscribe to this point of view. Have been trying several streaming apps recently but nothing comes close to the way you can discover music in roon if you use it more or less as it is intended to be used. Especially the way through searching for compositions and clicking from one artist’s bio to the other is unrivaled.
Apple Music and Qobuz are at least trying and while offering less browsing features they are at least consistent in what they are showing. Sometimes I wished roon´s metadata base for classical music would be better or there would be a way to hide albums which are having garbage data behind it.
Hi Alan, I have recently posted on this in your support topic…
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I often use Apple Music via the Sonos app for casual listening or gatherings throughout the house. And for kicks, I will occasionally try some Atmos content on the Sonos 5.1 setup. The Sonos app is clunky, but the Apple Music section is laid out pretty well and does a fairly good job with Stations. Much better than Roon Radio, which is completely useless.
Hi Alan. I’ve subscribed to JRiver for about ten years now. It plays my music every bit (!) as well as Roon. I keep both JRiver and Roon mainly because I don’t need internet with JRiver and I don’t have to give them money every year, though every three or four years I do upgrade to the latest edition. Old editions just keep working without payment after the initial licence purchase ($30 ish).
It doesn’t do any of the curating stuff Roon does, but it organises your library and allows you to tweak searches and all sorts. It also plays video and shows photos, if you’re into such things.
They usually have a free trial available, if you want to see for yourself.
One down side, customer service is via the forum. But then, it hasn’t broken since I’ve been using it.
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I too am a lifetime subscriber to Roon. Last year I was exposed to Squeeze and these days seldom visit Roon. Squeeze sounds CONSIDERABLY better and while there is no official support (it’s open source free software ,user supported) there is seldom if ever an issue with playback. Nothing quite comes close to the fabulous interface of Roon ( I visit every Friday to discover new Qobuz releases) but the trade off of SQ is well worth it. SO worth it. Most servers and players support the free download. Some companies allocate significant resources in support of Squeeze by improving the interface. Antipodes is one such company. I made the move late last year to Antipodes primarily bc of their tremendous customer support.
I am still waiting since October for Roon support to address my issue relating to my inability to create backups via my local network. I can only back up to my SSD. This issue bubbled up with the rollout of Mac Sonoma OS.
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